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Xbox 360 to get GPU memory shrink (updated)

TSMC is partnering with Microsoft to bring smaller memory chips to the Xbox …

TSMC has just announced that they're partnering with Microsoft to manufacture a smaller version the embedded DRAM chip that powers the Xbox 360's GPU. Some of the early press coverage I've seen of this announcement suggests that the new chips will make the console more reliable by cutting down on power consumption. That's totally not true, but I'm not going to rub anyone's nose in the error, because my original version of this post was similarly botched. More on that in a moment, though. For now, here's the background on the announcement:

The Xbox 360's ATI-designed "Xenos" GPU has a small, 10MB pool of embedded DRAM (eDRAM) on a separate die that's packaged together with the GPU. (The Wikipedia entry for Xenos has a great photo of this.) This bit of eDRAM, which runs at the GPU's core clockspeed of 500MHz, has so far been manufactured by NEC, but as of this new announcement Microsoft is switching production to TSMC.

One reason that I heard via email is that NEC has no plans to move their eDRAM production, which allegedly has some issues anyway, to 65nm. TSMC, in contrast, does plan to shrink the eDRAM down to 65nm, which will put it at the same feature size as the forthcoming versions of the console's CPU and GPU.

Incidentally, this tiny pool of eDRAM will have no discernible impact on the console's power consumption or price, no matter who makes it.

In the original post, I followed a few others in mistaking this for an announcement about the Xbox 360's 512MB pool of GDDR3, which was and is and will continue to be manufactured by Qimonda. A rep from Qimonda PR contacted me with a correction, and I do regret the error... especially since there's a pretty large difference between DRAM and embedded DRAM. Hey, I plead lack of coffee at the time of posting.